Gehenna: Where Death Lives (NR)

"You don't get it" says virtually every character at some point in the ambitious but unrewarding supernatural gore-fest Gehenna: Where Death Lives. Director Hiroshi Katagiri and co-writers Nathan Long and Brad Palmer spend so much time disentangling layers of convoluted backstory related to a cursed Hawaiian burial ground that it's often hard to tell exactly why profit-driven land developer Paulina (Eva Swan) and her motley crew of surveyors — including dopey tour guide Pepe (Sean Sprawling) and nice-guy architect Tyler (Justin Gordon) — are trapped inside a WWII bunker by a bunch of time-traveling ghosts.

Katagiri and his collaborators slowly and ineffectually explain — through momentum-crushing, dimly lit dialogue scenes — how a Chamorro curse already decimated a 17th-century Spanish conquistador, a platoon of 20th-century Japanese soldiers, and soon Paulina's 21st-century design team. Paulina and her crew's own connection to the bunker turns out to be as misconceived as the scare scene where Paulina is attacked at the 65-minute mark by her previously unmentioned (and now undead) son. Moments later, Paulina — who doesn't show, up until this point, any interest in Tyler — vaguely warns him that she can’t date him because her grief is too strong: “That’s why I can't be with anyone, can't you understand that?"

It's also hard to care about the fate of such underdeveloped characters when you don't even know why they're being attacked by a slew of reanimated corpses ranging from Pepe's dead mom to "the Old Man" (Doug Jones), a naked, ancient-looking wraith. If what you see is all that there is to "get," then Gehenna: Where Death Lives simply isn't worth puzzling over.